


Picking At A Worried Seam

by roachpatrol



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Addiction, Ashen Romance, Bloodplay, Caliginous Romance, F/M, Flushed Romance, M/M, Multi, Pale Romance, Soulmates, Vampire Sex, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-14
Updated: 2011-09-14
Packaged: 2017-10-23 17:49:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/253117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe vampires could have managed this better, you think, maybe some gentle human rainbow drinker could manage with a chromatic stable of one sole, small, sickly mark, but you didn’t<i> get</i> human fantasies, you’re not living a human story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Picking At A Worried Seam

**Author's Note:**

> _Red eyes and fire and signs  
>  I'm taken by a nursery rhyme  
> I want to make a ray of sunshine and never leave home...  
> \--Gotta Have You,_ The Weepies.

 

"This can't go on," Terezi says. Her mouth is cool and wet against your throat, her teeth combing too softly against your flesh to give you any satisfaction.

 

"Fuck you, I'm doing fine." 

 

"You don't taste fine, Karkles, you taste--"

 

"Fuck you! I'm doing fucking fine, is this one of those exercises where you repeat a word until it loses all meaning? Shall I fetch you a dictionary? Karkat is _fine_ , he is without a single flaw or defect; he is a magnificent specimen of not having a goddamn thing wrong with him!" 

 

"Just go up to him, you stupid grubpuff!" she huffs with frustration. "I don't know why you have to make such a huge production about it all the time, you know none of us _care_. We’re all working just fine with Kanaya."

 

She frowns down at you, her eyes too narrow, her mouth too serious. She doesn't look right when she's not smiling, as if when that smiling mask she always wears comes off it takes most of her face with it, too. You can't meet her blind, accusative stare, and you squirm a little, where your hips press up against hers. You can tell she's as ready for you as you are for her, and you don't know why you can't just get on with it-- you're fine, you're coping.

 

"Look," you growl finally, "he's not some magic happy-fucking-go-lucky miracle cure for little Karkat's case of the gumpies just because you think he shits candy and moonlight!" 

 

"He's a rainbow drinker, Karkat," Terezi retorts, "he probably does."

 

You’re suprised into laughing, and she smiles at that, her face snapping back into its proper shape.

 

"A few more days," you promise her. "We're so busy--"

 

"You're always busy--"

 

"Not too busy that I can't do this--" you say, and roll her over, kiss all over her rounded cheeks, her open mouth. She laughs and shrieks, and you make sure she keeps on making noise for a good long while. 

 

You're _fine._

 

*

 

"You ain't fine, amigo," Gamzee rumbles. You seat yourself more comfortably against him, raising a chorus of fluffy little squeaks-- your best friend's not allowed honk-horns anymore, but between Jade and Feferi, he's been more than supplied with improbably colored plushy noise-makers to mound up like an insane nutbeast. The pile is a vast improvement on all previous piles, however. There's something to be said-- or at least grudgingly admitted-- about human architectural skills: though noisy, the pile's thoroughly comfortable, and the plastic basin around the pile edge that the humans call a kiddie pool keeps you from even having to periodically rebuild the thing.

 

Gamzee's internal thoracic struts are a satisfyingly firm contrast to the plush softness, as he curls up around you, and his heartbeat is slow and perfectly even. 

 

"I'm fine," you reiterate. 

 

"You're jonesing, brother," he says. "You got the itches and you're making yourself all up to be like you can get your pretending around to how I shouldn't be on you about that kinda thing, motherfucker, but I am. I'm just trying to get my care on about my main fucking man, alright?"

 

You snarl and press your head against his chest, letting him stroke your face and wondering at how this is your life, getting shooshpapped by a murderous junkie clown instead of the other way around. 

 

"I can't," you say bleakly. "Just give me some time, okay, I can't give in this early."

 

"You ain't making anyone unhappy but your own self, best friend, you up and know that proper."

 

"I _don't_ know," you say. You mean it to come out sharp and angry but it just comes out pathetically lost. 

 

"Shoooosh, motherfucker," he says, patting your face so very gently. "You just shoosh. And get this fucking all dealt with and shit, you get me?"

 

"Not yet."

 

"Naw, man, yet."

 

"Not _yet_."

 

He sighs, and holds you close. You close your eyes and hang on to him, cool and steady and calm, and with every beat of his slow heart, you tell yourself you're fine, you're fine, you're fine, you're _fine._

 

*

 

You're not fine. The word has lost all meaning, limps out lame and unconvincing with every overworn repetition, and you can't even believe yourself anymore. You shake continuously with too much of all the wrong kind of anger, needing an outlet, needing an exit, needing needing _needing_. You set half a dozen of Equius's posters on fire, you put your foot through Sollux's favorite husktop, you make Jade cry. You make _John_ cry. Your troll friends start to bristle and snap, watching you with more resentment than respect, and the humans take wider and wider orbits, clearing off to their own arcane territories. 

 

It's when you get into the world's most embarrassing punch-up with Nepeta, of all people, that Kanaya wades in. 

 

"This can't go on," she snaps, every crisp word like a vertebrae crunching underfoot. She has the two of you by the scruff of your shirts, and you have gone limp with shame. 

 

"Three more days," you mumble, licking at the new gap in your teeth. 

 

"No, Karkat. Now."

 

"Two more days."

 

" _Now_."

 

Nepeta just looks at you, one eye swelling a vivid olive green and the other glistening with reproachful tears.

 

"Now," you sigh. "Put me down, I'll go."

 

Kanaya puts you down. 

 

"Maybe I should take a shower?"

 

"Now, Karkat!" she shouts, drawing her lipstick and blazing with that deathly white glow and you are struck stupid with all your pent-up needy stupid fucking hunger. Hunger and fear. 

 

You abscond. 

 

*

 

The roofs are Dave's territory, and manage to be as thoroughly irritating as their denizen. All around you spread dozens and dozens of flat platforms, the laboratory's myriad outside surfaces meeting at ridiculous angles, making improbably, treacherous shapes of gray on gray on gray. Above you stretches the shallow dome of black void. There is a light that falls around the roofs with the same listless indifference as the tasteless air, a colorless light that leaves few shadows. It’s as if it’s determined to reduce you into one more patch of gray, an unremarkable little section of the universe's most boring vista. You can hardly discern the placement of your own feet.

 

Against this Dave is a beacon: red jeans, a black-tshirt, skin that shines out white and steady as the humans' late lamented single moon. He's sitting with his legs dangling off a hundred foot drop, his shaded eyes facing out into the black void. 

 

"Stop brooding, fuckass," you greet him, "it makes you look like a tool."

 

"I don't know how you missed all your own memos, baby, I _am_ a tool," he says, and has the utter gall to look pleased to see you. You're not entirely sure how you can tell, but what kind of nemesis would you be if you didn't know how to read him? Something about the slope of his shoulders, the quirk of his thin pale lips around his fangs.

 

"I stopped listening about the third time past me had the gall to imply you weren't the most horrible catastrophe to be perpetrated upon an innocent troll in any two universes." 

 

"You know how to make me feel so special. Come here, give daddy a kiss," he says, quirking his white fingers, flashing those fangs, just the sight of them makes you weak all over. You come, god damn you, stumbling over your gray sneakers. Your knees hit the smooth gray stone-metal-plastic-shell tiles of what this whole lab is made out of, and you bury yourself in his mouth. 

 

He's as cold as the roof material, and warms even slower. But his two fangs are sharp as sin, the exclamation marks of his shitty flat human dentition, and when he scores one lightly over your questing tongue you whine and melt into him.

 

This is what you have been trying to avoid: you are so easy for him, so shamefully easy for him. It’s the bond between a rainbow drinker and his mark, it makes you prey for him, a willing sacrifice, a waiting meal that hungers for its own consumption. 

 

He sucks on your tongue and rolls you on to your back and you feel so fucking good, baring yourself like a trained whore up to his warming hands and utterly betraying your every caliginous desire. You are no kind of kismesis to him; you are no kind of kismesis to anyone. To hate him properly you would have to be able to balance your need with your loathing, your longing with your fury, and he has to do nothing but touch you and you crumple like an overexcited sugarcube. He needs you, and you need him, and none of this is anything like you’d ever wanted.  

 

Rainbow drinkers need troll blood, and settle on favorite marks through the chromatic spectrum, taking a bit of blue here and sip of rust there to keep their humors balanced; with your teams' entire suite of hemochrome to offer, Kanaya is as rich in sustenance as any bloodsucker could wish for, and shows the same amount of interest in your mutated freakjuice as she might for a nutrition plateau of steaming hoofbeast offal. 

 

She’s polite about it, doesn’t respect you any less as a leader, and this would be fine, this would all be utterly and completely _fine_ if it weren't for the entirely unavoidable issue of the humans, the issue of their one single color of candy red mutant blood as that issue relates to Dave's corpse sputtering and kicking back into some grating facsimile of consciousness under the joined hands of your heroes of Space and Life. 

 

Here, now, he’s pushing your shirt up, laying useless little kisses along your flesh as he goes, chirping low and tender at you each time, a pitch-perfect facsimile of concern that feels like it’s going to melt you right into the roof, and it isn’t fair that he knows how to _get_ to you like this, that he’s bothering to _try_. You hiss and kick at him, trying to encourage his mouth back up to your throat, and he just shrugs you off. 

 

“Hurry up,” you snap at him, your voice caught on the high humiliating edge of a keening moan, “Can we get this over with?”

 

“There some kinda troll rule against making sure you enjoy this too?”

 

“If there was would you stop?”

 

“If there was I’d go slower,” he says, and goes slower. His tongue is a dozen different shades of agony across your stomach. He presses his lips to your lowest left grubleg scar where it runs over the curve of your thoracic strut and he licks it: you slam your head back against the tiles to keep from screaming with pleasure and impatience. 

 

“Would you fucking _come on_ already!?”

 

“I just want you to be ready for all this manlove I’m about to dish your way, baby,” he says, licking softly, and if there’s something less than entirely insincere to him you don’t want to know. You want him to take you, hard and fast enough that you can limp back to your normal life and pretend like you don’t love every too-brief second of it. 

 

“I don’t give a fuck, I’m ready, you know I fucking was a week ago--”

 

“I know you’re here waggling your fucking ass up in my grill like you want to trade your derriere for a set of hamburgers, Vantas, I don’t know if any part of you is any more okay with this than you ever were. Can you blame a guy for taking it a little easy when he’s packing this kind of heat?”

 

“How does it even matter if I’m okay with this, I think we’ve established I am categorically not okay with any of this, but I want you, I’m ready, fucking bite me already, what’s your grubfucking problem--”

 

“Some of us don’t get our kicks off of rape, Sunshine,” he snaps. “Fancy that!”

 

“I guess that’s your problem, human, because I’m not in any kind of position I can actually say _no._ ”

 

His nostrils flare at that, his lips skinning back from those perfectly white teeth. “Say no. Say _no,_ Karkat.”

 

“No,” you say. “No, there, are you happy now? No, no, I hate this. I hate you. I hate that I can’t hate you. This is sick and wrong and I need you, okay, you’re so hungry and I can feel it inside me like you’re burning me with your stupid fucking sick fires, it hurts. If you asked me I would cut off my bulge and cook it for you and I’d be happy to do so, you make me happy just to touch you, look at you, I want you so bad that if fucking hurts. Fuck me already, okay? I’ll say anything you want, just _fix this fucking mess you made of me, Strider!_ ”

 

Your voice is a ragged shriek by the end, insane. Alien. He has laid claim to every piece of you that mattered and it makes him sick just looking at you.

 

You turn your face to one side and shake with need and loathing. 

 

“Please,” you keen.

 

He lets out a shaky breath, and finally deigns to slide your pants off your aching bulge. The fabric separates from your flesh with an obscene little wet sound-- you’ve been ready for him for hours now, if not days, aching all over, and you’re almost glad he’s going slowly because you’re already so sensitive. He slides a loose fist up your shaft from base to tip, gathering the wetness you’ve worked up in the hollows of his fingers, making you sob for breath and bite hard on the edge of your own hand.

 

He slips his wet fingers up into you as he bends down to graze your neck with his fangs, teasing the both of you, and you lose it. 

 

“Please, please, more,” you moan, hitching your hips desperately to try to take the whole length of his fingers at once, to try to find your way back to the encircling grip of his fist around your bulge. “Strider, come on, man, please!”

 

He shakes a little, drawing his hand back out and you chant “No, no, _no,_ ” stupid with hate and need and his breath comes curling out in shattered little pieces across your chest. 

 

“Karkat, shut up,” he hisses, and you shut up, shaking and silent, your hands pressed hard enough against your mouth that you’re cutting the insides of your lips with your own teeth. He fists your bulge again and again, root to tip and exactly backwards of how things should be going, like you keep getting wrenched out of where you want to be instead of ever getting what you want, tormenting you with just his hands until you are a sodden, quivering mess, your frustrated desire pooling redly underneath you across the gray tile. 

 

“Okay, so, I’m gonna fuck you now,” he says, hoarse, and you can’t say anything so you just nod, real fast, and try to squirm into his lap. 

 

Humans are a bit bigger than trolls in general, Dave a good deal larger than you in particular, and his bulge is practically a nightmare. It slides up against yours like some kind of deadly weapon, too hard and too dry and too fucking big, and he slicks himself up with your own juices and presses in. 

 

It’s uncomfortable as shit, he’s just too goddamn much, it’s all too goddamn much. You’re not compatible, it doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t feel natural. It feels like the best fucking thing that could ever happen to you. He pushes in forever, slow and careful and endless, filling you up till you’re hardly more than a strained casing and still you want more of him, and you drum your heels against the small of his back and gnaw your fingers raw and take him in, panting hard enough to rasp your lungs into cinders inside your chest. 

 

“God I can, smell you, can I-- want you--” he gasps, sticky hands flitting everywhere, the great and terrible Dave Strider and his endless font of wordy bullshit reduced to an idiot’s broken-up babble. You nod so hard you nearly shake your head off, hauling his mouth down to the hollow of your throat, baring yourself in every possible way to him. 

 

With a noise that sounds horribly like a sob he finishes seating his dick inside you, and plunges his fangs into your throat. 

 

Your back comes off the tile in an electrified arch and your breath comes out in a high soundless explosion, burning through your teeth. 

 

“You can scream,” he mumbles, “go on, make some noise,” and he’s licking at you, biting, licking again, turning your throat into a bloody lace and your cranial thinklobes into so much slag. You scream and scream, obligingly and also incredibly sincerely, caught up in a haze of electric noise and desire. There exists only Dave and how many points he is using your body for his own gratification, your blood down his throat and his dick rocking up hard and merciless inside you and his fingers hungry for every piece of softness your skin has to offer. You would feed every part of yourself to him a dozen times over; you’ve already fed him three times, and each time it only gets worse, only ever feels better. 

 

Twenty seven days, some little voice in you is sane enough to murmur, twenty seven days, and last time it was thirty five, and the last time before that it was forty two-- how much longer are you going to be fine, when this is the alternative, when this is so much more than anyone could ever want?

 

He fists your bulge, pumping you the right way down, this time, and you know you are never going to be truly fine again when this is what you have to compare ‘fine’ to. You come, your genetic release flooding his hand and his dick, your hammering pulse spilling out of you all across his hungry mouth and he sobs and grunts like an animal. He drives his dick up into you a final time and sucks your neck, hard enough to send you into giddy convulsions, and you can feel his climax tearing at you, tearing you open and sinking down farther into every desperate piece of your soul that needs to belong to someone who could make you feel like this. 

 

He goes limp and shuddery over you, with a final little cry that catches up your heart and ties a bow around it. He licks at your neck and his sodden fingers with a breathless contentment and you, you just lie beneath him, all your pain reduced to the simply physical. He is satiated, and you are finally at peace. 

 

“Karkat?” he finally asks, pulling back, breathing hard. “That was okay, right? I mean, you’re not flipping your shit anymore is the thing?” When he meets your eyes the tentative smile drops right off his face. “Oh, fuck, Karkat--”

 

You look at him. 

 

“Snap out of it,” he says, flicking his sticky fingers in front of your eyes, patting your cheek. 

 

“Out of what, nookstain?” you ask. 

 

“This, you know what, this! Stop looking at me like this, all... peaceful and shit.”

 

You close your eyes. You want to lie here until you rot to pieces. You’re so tired, and you feel so very good, you feel cold and blank and empty as the void. 

 

“Oh, shit, you’re totally wasted, aren’t you? I went and fucked you into a coma, that’s gotta be some kind of high score--”

 

You bat at his face, feel your palm connect damply with his cheek. He laughs at that, bright and relieved, and claps his hand over yours. 

 

“If I broke you, Terezi is going to wear my gizzard as a _hat,_ you know that? God only knows why, but that girl likes you ornery. Now get your ass up, bitch.” 

 

He sort of bundles you back into your pants and shirt, then tucks you up close to his chest as he climbs to his feet. You loop your arms around his neck, glad for once that he’s bigger than you, because it gives him leave to grant you this one small mercy; he’ll carry you back to your respite block, now of all times, of all vulnerabilities-- no one will get to see you like this but him. You press your face to the lambent hollow of his throat. His stolen pulse jumps, when you press your lips against the brightness, and you find yourself pressing forward, nipping and nuzzling at him. He stumbles at the edge of a transportalizer and nearly goes back down to his knees. 

 

“You’re going to-- Karkat, god, no, don’t,” he hisses. “We can’t keep _doing_ this.”

 

“You _want_ me,” you say grimly, already feeling the hunger unfurl inside of you.

 

“Not again, not right after I already-- last time was the-- last time, I don’t, I can’t, I’d fucking kill you, Chez Strider is _closed_ for the month, okay?” he says. You run your mouth along the trails of borrowed warmth under his luminous skin, tracking the thrum of his desire as it rises up through your own veins in response, and he jerks his head back from you as if trying to shake his way out of a bad dream. 

 

“No,” he says, squeezing you hard enough to hurt. “Fucking _no_ , I said stop it!”

 

Your breath hitches as you’re caught in the crossfire of two opposing compulsions, and you start to shake, digging your claws into his shoulders, as they blossom into a syrupy sort of pain inside your head. 

 

“Please,” you beg, hating yourself, this weakness: there is no escape from it anywhere, whatever you do, it’s inside you, it _is_ you. “I’d do anything for you-- you didn’t take _enough_ , it’s going to be hell, I’ll do anything--”

 

“Then shut up. Just... shut up. I’ll take more when we get back to your place.”

 

You cram a knuckle into your mouth and bite hard. You manage to keep some semblance of quiet going as he steps through the transportalizer, winds his way in a series of nauseating flashes through the labs and into your private halls. 

 

“This’s your stop,” he says, trying to put you down in your respite block, and you snarl and cling tight. “Vantas, get the fuck off!”

 

“You can’t leave me like this,” you gasp, practically rutting your sticky, shredded throat up against his bare shoulder, desperate enough that shame is a distant memory. There is only need and terror; if he leaves you like this, wanting you like this and _leaving_ you, you will go mad. 

 

He pushes you down against the floor, pries your every finger off him one by one.

 

“One day,” he says raggedly, “You’re going to go too far, I’m not going to be able to say no--”

 

“Don’t say no,” you beg. “Don’t say no, don’t you _dare_ fucking say no.”

 

He gets your last finger off of him, and shoves you away hard. “One of us has to,” he says, and the loss of contact feels exactly like what you think dying must be like. “It might as well be the one of us that can mean it.”

 

You lunge for him but he’s already gone; your reaching hands only catch his afterimage. You crumble into yourself, shaking and exhausted, your blood still seeping hot down your neck and chest, and you bury your face in your knees and your hands in your hair and you finally, _finally_ let yourself cry. 

 

Maybe vampires could have managed this better, you think, maybe some gentle human rainbow drinker could manage with a chromatic stable of one sole, small, sickly mark, but you didn’t _get_ human fantasies, you’re not living a human story. What you’ve got is blood the color of candy and an alien rainbow drinker with an unfathomable conscience that makes him act crazy, makes him drive _you_ crazier, and the walls are closing in and your bodies are traitors to their own desires and every day you cross off without his touch is hell and no one understands and it’s so _goddamn_ hard. You’ve got nothing but willpower to get you through this, an iron will and a steady heart and a skinful of complete damnation. 

 

You take your shirt off, and you wipe your face clean of tears and snot and your throat clear of tacky-wet blood, wincing and shaking just a little from aftershocks. 

 

You’re fine, you tell yourself as you crawl into your recuperacoon, you’re fine, you’ll be fine. The slime burns through all your wounds as it sterilizes them, and you fall towards sleep with all the eager grace of a suicide diver. You’re Karkat Vantas, you’re smart and you’re strong and if you’re small, you’re going to grow, there’s still time. You’re going to find a way out of this, you’re going to brave your way through it. 

 

Tomorrow will be day one, again. Today is day zero.  You want him so bad it hurts; you don’t think you’ll make it past thirty days ever again.

 

You’ll be fine. 

 

 

 


End file.
